Valve has given the creators of 15-year-old Half-Life co-op mod ‘Sven Co-op’ its blessing to develop the mod into a full release on Steam, as well as granting them access to the original game’s GoldSrc engine.

Posting on the Sven Co-op forum, a member of the dev team announced the big news and spooled off some new additions that will appear in the Steam release.

He explained that the game will run as standalone using a customised version of the GoldSrc engine, and it will be free for all Steam users. It will include the original Half-Life campaign and does not require the full Half-Life game to run.

The release will come with automatic updates using SteamPipe and will include new features and enhancements, including a series of new updates to the Half-Life level editor called ‘Hammer’. The improvements will result in a larger, more detailed Half-Life world.

“We are grateful beyond expression to Valve for their generosity and efforts put forth to make this possible,” the developer added. “We’re looking forward to working with one of the greatest game engines ever made, and we can assure everyone that there are many, many more updates to come.”

So basically it’s a better version of Half-Life with co-op, and it’s absolutely free. Can’t argue with that too much can you.